China opens the world’s longest road bridge

This week, the Chinese opened the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge – and it’sofficially the longest roadway bridge over water in the world.

It spans a mind-boggling 26 miles – that’s five miles further than the distance between Dover and Calais and longer than a marathon, between the city of Qingdao and the Huangdao District, and was built to halve commuter times and improve capacity of the local port.

The bridge took four years and cost a cool £5.5billion to build. Its pipped the previous record-holder – the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana, by nearly three miles.